Sebastian Heilpern

I was born in NY to two Argentine immigrants, grew up in Buenos Aires, and moved to Brooklyn as a teenager. After graduating from Cornell in 2010, I was the Program Officer for the Latin American and Caribbean Program at the Wildlife Conservation Society. I received an M.S. from University of Chicago and a PhD from Columbia University.

As an ecologist and sustainability scientist I’m interested in the causes and consequences of biodiversity change on ecosystem functions and services. While I’m a generalist and have thought about a broad set of systems (e.g. plants, birds, made up data), I primarily focus on freshwater biodiversity, fisheries and human nutrition. My work uses theoretical, experimental and observational approaches, and their combination, to answer questions about how humans are changing biodiversity and, in turn, how these changes affect the services we rely on.